Newburgh Heritage

Dreaming of faraway places

By Mary McTamaney
Posted 10/17/19

There is a short cell phone video that made the news last week on a number of networks and platforms. A mother filmed her little boy, with a backpack nearly as tall as himself, walking toward his …

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Newburgh Heritage

Dreaming of faraway places

Posted

There is a short cell phone video that made the news last week on a number of networks and platforms. A mother filmed her little boy, with a backpack nearly as tall as himself, walking toward his preschool reciting a mantra she had taught him: “I am smart; I am blessed; I can do anything!” The child is adorable. We can’t help but believe that he can do anything and we hope that soon he will be old enough and strong enough to be a leader.

That boy is walking into a world that needs him and his classmates to use their smarts and blessings. A moment watching today’s international newscasts proves that. Will our children have the facts about their world to guide its future? Where will they learn about the people and places affecting their lives?

For generations, right into my youth, we relied on geography class in school. Teachers pulled down big maps and we took turns walking up and tracing the latitudes, longitudes, rivers and place names of the wider world beyond our Newburgh classroom windows. I was one child who loved geography and my atlas book. I would daydream as I traced the length of the Volga or the Amazon or the Danube River and wondered what it would be like to see the places my fingertip was touching in high mountains and hidden valleys.

A chance came for me to imagine the mindset of my ancestors taking these same paper journeys last month when a woman brought me an old geography book. It was Harper’s School Geography published in 1885 and used for decades as a required textbook in the Newburgh School District. The old, worn book had last been used by the woman’s ancestor, Christian Diesseroth, when he was a boy. His signature is the last one on the bookplate inside the cover pasted there by the teachers of Grammar School Number One, which was on Washington Street. There was a great connection at our meeting the day she handed me the book. We were at the interpretive walk the historical society was hosting through historic Woodlawn Cemetery.

Christian Diesseroth and many of his family are buried there and so are the famous Harper Brothers who published the book. The Harper family established a publishing empire in 1817 that continues today.

Schoolbooks were a large part of their business in the 19th century.

Harper’s School Geography was a revelation. Its many maps and engravings followed an extensive curriculum that summarized physical, political, economic and social aspects of every nation and state. Of course, it was very Eurocentric and what we sometimes refer to as second and third world nations got dismissive and patronizing treatment although their vegetation and animal life was lushly described. The isolation of the world’s peoples in the mid-nineteenth century still kept their cultures distinct and the geography book’s drawings of foreign ports and street bazaars as well as vast wilderness areas must have peaked the curiosity of Newburgh youngsters.

Today, a cell phone click can pull up a more detailed and accurate map and allow a child to zoom in and see far more. Journalists, travelers and publishers have vast databanks of photographs to illustrate every place one might read or hear about. Yet, are children pulling down at least a mental world map and finding their place on it?

Somewhere across the globe, perhaps on a street in Erbil, another mother may be sending her boy out saying in Kurdish, “I am smart; I am blessed; I can do anything!” Let’s hope both boys have good geography teachers.